Sune Jonsson

A discovery. I had never heard of this photographer before. But recently, whilst leafing through a Steidl catalogue I picked up at Paris Photo two years ago, I was struck by some of his pictures. Earlier this week I was in Lund, a sleepy university town in the south of Sweden, where I happened to bump into a catalogue of a 2009 exhibition of his work ("And time becomes a wondrous thing ...").

Jonsson (1930-2009) seems to have focused largely on the rural life of his native Västerbotten area in the north of Sweden. Most of the work shown in the book dates from the 1960s and 1970s. People lived extremely frugally. Life revolved around the work on the land, the family and faith. No television, hardly a radio. The stove, pets or musical instruments provided companionship and relaxation.

Jonsson mixes landscapes with very formal and at the same time very personal portraits of farmers and their families. The compositions are not fanciful, but strong and sturdy. Which does not mean they are not imaginative. There is a picture, for example of a farmer's wife sitting on a couch. Suddenly you realise her husband's face is reflected in the mirror above. Jonsson's restraint and classicism also betrays a certain grittiness, a tragic sense of fragility. Sometimes I had a flash of recognition and I could see a foreshadowing of Anders Petersen's extremely visceral style. There is also a connection with the equally personal Baltic approach of Vitas Luckus (my very first photo book, way back in the early 1980s), not that far away from Sweden after all.

In his work Jonsson manages to stay away from a saccharine rural romanticism and expose something very authentic, unadorned, tough and true about a simple life on the land. A great photographer.